Illustrator and podcaster Andy J. Pizza on what to do when motivations and interests change

Give me a peek into your world.

I’ve heard writer Cal Newport talk about lifestyle-centric planning; I would reword it as neurotype-centric world building. You’re building your world around whatever weird person you are and what you need.

One of the things I need is to spend tons of time with the things I’m obsessed with. The tricky part about that as an ADHD person is they change over time. For the first part of my career, I was less aware they would change as much as they do. I thought, “Illustration is my passion and obsession and that will be the thing that sustains me throughout a career.”

In my 20 years of pursuing that, I had a period of time where I was like, “Oh no, I don’t care that much about illustration right now.” And that was really scary. But then I realized that illustration is a great thing to build your life around as an ADHD person because it is a tool to dig into whatever you want to dig into. So now I think about illustration and storytelling as very connected because my favorite definition of illustration is writing with pictures. It’s this hyperfixation that keeps me interested in being alive.

Have your existential spirals gotten easier with time?

It definitely has gotten easier with time. I’m going to bring up something you should never talk about in a creative interview. It’s this embarrassing thing that has helped me make sense of that, called the BCG Growth-Share Matrix from the world of business and business consulting. It is about this dynamic between what you’re passionate about right now and what you’ve mastered.

Often what you’ve mastered, you’re less passionate about. Especially if you’re an ADHD person; the less novel it is, the better you get at it, the less interesting it is, and the less dopamine you get from it.

The thing I like about this Growth Share Matrix is it talks about how much share of a market you have, how established you are in that market, versus how much that market is growing. It’s a framework that’s helped me understand what I’m most passionate about right now is almost impossible to make money from because I have no mastery in it. I have no proof I’m good at this. It’s given me peace to realize the thing that’s going to be my cash cow is something I’m not white-hot passionate about but I’m very sufficient in.

All businesses are all creative journeys. There’s a cycle and a process to how this goes. The thing I’m really passionate about might eventually become my main thing, but by the time it does, I probably won’t be as passionate about it, but that’s okay, because the times when I’ve had every part of my passion monetized is usually where I’m the least happy. I’ve realized if I don’t have something I’m cheating on my day job with, I’m not naturally motivated. I want to have something that makes me want to get out of bed a couple of hours earlier so that I can fit in this other thing that I’m obsessed with.

What is your current get-out-of-bed early gig?

Storytelling is an infinite well of novelty. I love that every time I try to write a story, I get better at it. But you’re always at the mercy of it and you might not get it. It’s like gambling. And the ideal of gambling is that you don’t win every time because that’s actually not that fun. You want something where sometimes I win, sometimes I don’t.

I spent about a decade interested in nonfiction narrative podcasting and storytelling. My podcast, Creative Pep Talk, is on the surface a creative self-help show, but I approached it through a narrative lens. Most episodes have a story or a metaphor as the core. Every episode was an experiment in storytelling and most of it was through the narrative of personal stories.

You’ve spoken in the past about learning the rules of any craft before you learn how to break them. Do you have fun learning things?

I love it because it’s difficult. When the show started taking off in the little niche I’m a part of, a lot of people in that scenario go all in. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but it would’ve been the wrong thing to do for me. I wanted to be somebody who is both in the field and in the lab. I wanted to be talking about the projects that I was doing, not just that other people were doing.

A lot of people learn some rules, make worse stuff, and then turn around and go back to making it up through intuition and flying by the seat of their pants. I get that. But on the other side of learning the rules is where really, really, really good stuff happens.

One of my favorite examples is Del the Funky Homosapien, the rapper. He has said in interviews the hit song that put Gorillaz on the map was because he had just read a book about how to write hit songs for dummies. He just read and he applied everything he learned to make that song. I’m pretty familiar with his work prior to that era and it feels like it leveled up a lot in terms of intrigue and interest and how to keep people hooked.

Creative researchers define creativity as something that is both novel and useful. I think a lot of creative people, probably rightfully so, push back on that, because it’s a bit utilitarian to call it useful. But there’s all kinds of ways that things are useful. Useful for a mood boost or being disturbed—there’s utility to all that. We think creativity is synonymous with novelty, new, never been done, and therefore, why would you learn how other people did it? That’s the opposite of what you’re trying to do–but I don’t think that’s true.

Working from that definition of it being new, it can be disheartening as a new creative to go into a field and say, “Well, everything has already been done. There’s nothing new for me to say.” Which is categorically false. It’s not about that. Like, look at how many love songs there are.

They’re just as infinite as people. Statistically, there’ll never, ever be a human that has the same DNA as you. DNA is completely different, and so your experience is completely different.

Instead of thinking about creativity as something you’re going to the edge of what’s possible for, it’s more interesting to think about going deeper within yourself. You’re going to find a way of saying something that’s never been said. There’s tons of value in fitting in before you stand out. Like in science, you’re not going to reinvent the wheel. You’re going to figure out a lot of your education is updating where we are and where things are to be overturned. I feel like creatives could use more of that.

What do you think are some other challenges facing creatives today?

Every sector is feeling the weight of all the money being hoarded at the top. It’s a huge problem. But there’s a natural cycle to how creative things happen. When the mainstream culture crowds out all creative stuff and it becomes homogenized and boring corporate, then you have underground scenes that happen.

For good and for bad, I was starting at a time where business was interested in creative stuff. And for a minute, it was great for creative people because they were having all this money invested in them, and brands were becoming patrons of artists.

Instagram is the climax of that journey for visual artists or anyone that works in static images. We had this incredible, but also problematic, moment where visual art was at the center of society, culture. Even my neighbors who have no connection to the art world were following my friends that were illustrators and photographers.

The cool thing was for a little bit of time, creativity was valued by the whole culture to some degree. That moment of creativity and art being so culturally relevant is over in the mainstream. If you look at the mainstream now, these are bros and basic people. It’s a totally different landscape on what’s cool and what’s not cool. I think the challenge for artists is to not care about that.

Not care about it being over?

Not care about being culturally relevant and actually being countercultural. We’ve entered a space where that’s what artists have to do. Instead of being at the center of culture, they have to start attacking culture. They have to start creating opposing spaces.

The real challenge in career creatives is being able to unpick highly designed algorithms from their brain. Huge billions and billions of dollar companies are telling you how to make your art and they’re telling you for free. That’s weird. Why is Instagram calling artists? They’re actually having phone calls with artists. Why are they creating resources, free resources on how to make content for the platform? Because they are a TV channel and you’re making all the content for free. They’re making all the money, you’re making all the content.

I think about it like changing your sport. You used to be a hockey player, but now soccer is in, and now you’re just going to drop the old sport and go become a soccer player. I feel like the artists I know that have accepted that that’s over have been able to create a new way and build clients instead of fans and followers.

This idea of design versus default is something I’ve been thinking a lot about. Something you have to do in this moment, when there’s all these existential challenges, is to imagine, “What’s next?”

You have to decide to not care what the cultural cache is. It was interesting when Instagram announced we were going to value content with a different metric. We’re going to exchange for a different currency. They said, “We’re no longer going to really value likes. We’re only going to value views.” That was an interesting moment to be like, does that match my values? There are billions and billions of dollars spent to try and make it impossible for you to unpick that value, to let them determine what you value.

How have you determined what works for you?

My personal values always start with two things. It has to be something I am authentically interested in. As an ADHD person, I live or die on that being the dopamine.

When I was growing up and I didn’t have any knowledge of myself or the type of brain that I had, my relationship to dopamine was very unhealthy. Drugs and food—not extreme drugs—but drugs and food and all of the typical ways of dopamine farming. But I learned really quickly this is something you either pay upfront or you pay after.

If you pay upfront for your dopamine, it looks like going on a run. It’s hard at first and then sustainable later versus the other side around. For me, creative work is like that. Creative work is a healthy way of getting my dopamine I need. If I work really hard and I make something I’m excited about, that’s a great way that I feel healthy and happy. So, the first thing is it has to be something linked to a hyper-curiosity.

Secondly, I am motivated by meaning. This is one of the things that makes it really difficult for me to do traditional work, where we abstract like, “I’m spending this much time here doing this thing and that somehow leads to money—which is also an abstraction of value—and that means I’m going to feed my kids.”

The two things I like are when it’s something I’m curious about and it’s something that seems to be good for other people. Then I start thinking about what this thing should be, what it should turn into. Then, how do I get people to discover this?

It’s so interesting that your values encapsulate novelty and utility like the definition of creativity we were talking about earlier.

Damn, you got that one. I didn’t see it, but it’s right there. That’s so true.

When I start thinking about what I value in terms of discoverability, I try to unpick that from what I’m told to value. How do you become an illustrator in people’s minds that’s a full person they’re a fan of?

Building trust with people is so based on authenticity. You can’t fake interest.

No. It almost never works.

Do you get to the point of burnout? If so, how do you get past that?

I’ve been better for the past few years about balancing things. I’ve had lots of seasons where I was perpetually burnt out. Two things have helped me not be burnt out as much. One is a mindset thing. In my mind, there was a lie that said, “I really want to be doing one thing exclusively,” whatever that thing is. I think a lot of creative people will relate to that. Wanting to just paint, or write, or make pictures. And then everything that gets in the way becomes a problem.

One of my favorite things I ever learned is something I think about all the time because it sounds like bullshit or magic but it’s actually true. It helped me when I realized the difference between distress and eustress—bad stress and good stress. Bad stress hurts your heart, hurts your body, makes you sick. Eustress helps you. It’s actually good for you. The difference between them is how you think about this obstacle. This is where things like acceptance come into play.

Historically, we have all these traditions about accepting things. Even if you think about it in a mystical way of accepting your fate or accepting your calling, finding an acceptance that if you see this stress as a thing you’re choosing, then it can manifest as good stress in your body.

Anybody reading this, you should go read about it. Don’t just take my word for it because it sounds crazy. To me, it does. I read it in a book and I was like, “That can’t be true.” And I went and read about it and I was like, “Wow, there’s tons of evidence about this.”

I bring that up because when I thought I should be doing art all day, everything around the art was giving me distress because I was rejecting it. Now it’s not like I like doing email but I know that I can’t do more useful things in the hours between one and four o’clock because you can’t be hardcore creative for more than four hours a day anyway. So that’s not a terrible use of my time.

Because I have a couple of different creative disciplines, they cross-pollinate and help me stay interested and bleed into each other. So that’s helped me accept it more, which has helped me with burnout.

This is the second time I’ve mentioned Cal Newport but the reason why I’m a big fan of him is because he’s one of the only productivity guys that comes at it from, “How do we do what matters?” Not “How do we do more?”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jun Chou.